


A Lifeline

by aspiegirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Commitment (of a sort), Healing, Loss, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Promises, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aspiegirl/pseuds/aspiegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has lost someone he loved, and made it through to the other side. Sherlock hasn't yet, and John can see it...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lifeline

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by Drake's Take Care ft. Rhianna. 
> 
> Seriously, charlotteshay. is a bad influence on me. I don't think I'm even capable of writing something happy.

John would wait for Sherlock. He would wait forever if he had to. The pain he had seen in Sherlock’s eyes, the fear of being abandoned, alone, adrift, had caught John, pulled him in. He knew that feeling. He knew there was nothing to do but wait...

 

It had been years ago, back in his twenties, when he had made his biggest mistake. He’d just returned from his first deployment and was working in one of the Ministry of Defense Hospital Units. It was there that he met Evan. When they were together, it was like all the songs, everything shiny and rose coloured. It was his first relationship as an adult, his first time being in love, _really_ in love, not like when you say you are in high school because the other person said it and you have to say it back or lose them forever. It was the first time he felt the earth tilt around him.

The second time was when Evan ended it, not breaking off, neat and clean, but ripping, shredding, _tearing_ their relationship apart, and John in the process. He spent a full year disoriented, drifting, trying to find something to hold on to. What he found was a medic’s bag, a dusty tent, and a gun in his hand. It took awhile, but he found his anchor in the men around him, in the wounds he healed. Even when it was he who was injured, he used it, turned his scar as a line that tied him to a place within himself that Evan never reached, that he had lost when they were together, that core that held him up even on the days when the memories and the anxiety and the fear were the worst. It wasn’t until much later that he realized what he had done with Evan, giving himself up to please him. Evan had insisted on keeping their relationship a secret from most of their friends, had, on occasion, left John with bruises on his arms from where he’d dragged them out of a store or a pub upon seeing someone they knew. John could remember a few other bruises as well, one’s with even flimsier justifications. Looking back, John had, on more than one occasion, tried to feel disgust for Evan, for what he had put John through, but even now, knowing better, seeing how good relationships worked, he couldn’t hate Evan. He could only hate himself, and those were the days when his hand trembled the most, when he was most excited that they had a case, that there was something for him to do, some way for him to prove to himself that people can change and grow and learn.

He hadn’t realized at first that what Sherlock was looking for was an anchor. In all of these murders, in his pissing contest with Moriarty, his interest in Irene, he was trying to find something he had lost; when Mycroft next approached John alone, John asked him if Sherlock had ever been in a relationship. Mycroft told John about the whirlwind romance, blistering in its heat, that had consumed Sherlock, become his obsession, his only reason for being, and finally, the brutal stabbing two streets away from their apartment, where the man (John could not remember his name, in some ways didn’t want to) had died of blood loss. It was then, Mycroft explained, that Sherlock had floated away on a cloud of cocaine and heroin, drifting further and further away until Mycroft had told him of a case of a man being stabbed, nearly identical that of Sherlock’s lover, and Sherlock had turned, with his single minded intensity, to the murder, tracking down the killer in three days. From there, he continued, taking cases instead of drugs (most of the time), until John had arrived. Mycroft told him that, until John had come, Sherlock had been made of sharp edges, rough surfaces, pricking anyone who got too close, allowing only a few to even be near him, like a ship out at sea, far from any land, with its anchor let down, but still aimless, if slightly less wandering.

When John heard all this, he had left the aircraft hanger to which Mycroft had taken him, somehow returning to 221B, going immediately to his room, afraid to face Sherlock, that the sadness in his eyes and his heart would be mistaken for pity, and drive Sherlock away. It was in his room that he decided what he would do.

He knew there was nothing he could say that would ever change anything, no words that could erase the hurt, the loneliness, the chasm left in Sherlock. He could remember Harry trying to talk to him about Evan, bashing him, calling him an arsehole and a wanker; he remembered feeling bewildered by the venom with which she spoke. In John’s mind, it was, as Evan had told him, his own fault. He had no one but himself to blame. Having seen Sherlock’s reaction to the old lady’s death, despite all his protestations about not caring about the people involved in the crimes he solved, he knew Sherlock was more than capable of guilt, that it was quite likely all these crime fighting escapades were an attempt to assuage his guilt that his lover had lain, two streets away, dying, and Sherlock had done nothing, been able to do nothing.

So, John decided, he would say nothing. He would simply stay, and be there for Sherlock, try to give him support, structure, love, even, someone else to latch on to for as long as it took him to find himself, not an anchor per se, but rather a lifeline, a rope that Sherlock could use to pull himself back from the dark, lonely emptiness that was, for the moment, all he could see.

**Author's Note:**

> I appreciate all comments, especially critiques!


End file.
